Affordable Nutrition is More than Food

It's about removing friction & seismic systemic redesign

Everyone can relate to some degree to the post-holiday “food intake reset”. I don’t overindulge on vacation and I take plenty of steps, but I still indulge in a way that has to have a finite end or I could find myself heading down that slippery slope of sub-optimal eating. I mean who doesn’t enjoy a nutella crepe at a cafe, a gelato in Florence, a glass of champagne at a Brasserie, a pint in a pub, a warm chocolate brioche at the local Boulangerie? You get the idea. Clearly not items that should be the core of a diet that optimizes mitochondrial function… And so this Monday was met with me back in tracking my intake on Cronometer, not just calories, but macronutrients & micronutrients and hitting my targets. Great in theory until you have to plan & cook the actual combo of food that will enable you to hit said targets when you don’t even have time to get to the grocery store let alone figure it all out.

As I sat in the sun (to get my 10 min of “red light” intake - those mitochondria are demanding!) eating my lunch while contemplating how I would hit my daily targets the rest of the day knowing I’m on planes until late tonight, I thought, this is impossibly complicated. And imagine not having all of the luxuries I am granted (financial means, food access, time allocation choices, nutritional knowledge, cooking facility / housing access - just to name a few).

Part I - The Food Itself

Ultra Processed Food (UPF) makes up 70-75% of our food supply. And 60% of the US diet comes from UPFs. Not surprising, a groundbreaking study published in 2019 found people on an ultraprocessed diet ate on average 500 more calories a day than people on a similar but minimally processed diet (matched for calories offered, sugar, fat, fiber and macronutrients). Meanwhile over $4T is spent on chronic disease - with the majority of that disease is considered cardiometabolic in nature. As we noted earlier this week - part of the “death star” that we have created.

The Green Revolution of the 1960’s (we wrote about it last month) all but eradicated famine globally. The increases in yield from Borlaug’s work is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.

But now we are left with a new unintended consequence. Overconsumption… Since 1961, the global average population weighted food supply per person per day rose from 2,196 calories to 2,962 calories in 2017. To put these figures in perspective, the US Department of Agriculture recommends that moderately active adult men consume between 2,200 and 2,800 calories a day and moderately active women consume between 1,800 and 2,000 calories a day. (Link - How Humanity Won the War on Famine)

And yet instead of having a systemic discussion around how to redesign our food supply based on “nutrition” and not simply “calories” we are arguing about SNAP. I’m usually nothing but complimentary of Dr. Mark Hyman - someone I consider a core founder of the movement of actual health and food is medicine. But his post this morning really struck me. And to be frank, helped me sort through my own conflicted POV with the ongoing SNAP debate.

drmarkhyman

A post shared by @drmarkhyman

Why should it come as a surprise that 75% of SNAP purchases are ultraprocessed when that mirrors our available food supply!?

I appreciated Tom Rifai M.D.’s (The Flex5 Lifestyle) clarification about Hyman's claim on LinkedIn, as it gets even more at the heart of the issue with our food supply.

Unfortunately the nova score that currently defines “ultra processed foods“ is grossly inaccurate as it relates to nutrient density, energy density and hyper palatability…

That being said, we all need to move together on our farm bill rather than just focus on depriving the poor. We need a wholesale change in our food policy and food environment as well as food culture of “Chicago hot dog eating contest followed by biggest loser at 7 PM!“.

Then Hyman goes on to say

SNAP was created to fight hunger - not to fund chronic disease - Hyman

BULLSEYE. Although I’d restate it. SNAP was created to supply calories, not supply nutrition. He’s mixing cause and effect a bit here. Chronic disease is an unintended consequence of our focus on cheap calories. It just so happens that the food companies figured out how to monetize it and have gone a little “tobacco” with UPFs. It’s been a while since we’ve known the health consequences of our food supply yet the Kelce brothers are still making millions pushing colorful, metabolic disasters of a cereal from food manufacturers coming up with the next big campaign.

And finally, he doubles down with the statement “hot, nutritious meals?” Not covered. But the thing is, they don’t actually exist today at scale!! Let’s say we start allowing SNAP to be used at Sweetgreen - for a hot, nutritious meal, that $15 meal isn’t going to get someone through 2 days of eating.

This leads me to why affordable nutrition is about more than just food. It’s an actual system that needs to be created and/or redesigned.

A system where we have AFFORDABLE, CONVENIENT, NUTRITIOUS MEALS (hot or not).

Part II - Turning Whole Food Into Affordable Nutrition

Eating optimally is currently EXTRAORDINARILY difficult. It’s hard to navigate, expensive and time consuming (meal planning, prepping/cooking). It’s not just because the floor space of the grocery store is dominated by food items that don’t meet the actual definition of food, it’s because friction abounds. Even if we flipped the paradigm in the grocery store with our current foods and made 25% of the shelf space UPFs and 75% whole foods, it wouldn’t change things dramatically.

People wouldn’t know what to do with the whole food. Not to mention that we might not even have enough supply to stock our grocery stores with 75% whole foods.

Affordable nutrition is an entire system. It involves addressing all of the current friction points and misalignment:

• Soil

• Seed

• Farms

• Processing

• Distribution

• Ingredients

• Definitions

• Subsidization

• Manufacturing

• Marketing

• Policy

• Regulations

• Education

• Access

• Retail

• Health outcomes

• Health insurance premiums

• Health Savings Accounts

• Employers

It’s about a new definition of food cost. It’s a seismic shift from cheap calories to affordable nutrition. One that can’t take 60 years (the same amount of time it took to evolve to where we are today), because the unintended consequence of cheap calories will bankrupt us with healthcare cost burdens first.